In December 1926, when the writer Marion Milner (née Blackett) was 26 years old, she started keeping a diary. Her aim was to understand what made her happy and motivated in life, so that she might feel more present in living it.
For years Milner had been feeling dissatisfied, going about her days in a “half-dream state” with a vague but prevailing discontent. Nothing was exactly wrong – she was well-off, beginning her career as an industrial psychologist, and soon to be married – yet still she felt “something was the matter”. Her life in London was “of dull dead-level mediocrity, with the sense of real and vital things going on round the corner”.
Milner lived in constant fear of causing offence, or being found wanting; she was dependent on others’ approval, while feeling somehow shut off from them. So she resolved to use a diary to plumb her “private reality” for clues to a more authentic way of being. Her initial findings were far from promising.
Instead of essential insights into “how one should live”, Milner was dismayed to find her diary filled with trivial matters – her anxieties about “the number of things to be done”, whether she’d have time to get her haircut before work, and then if any colleagues would remark on “how nice it looked”. Her first glimpse of self-knowledge appalled her: “I’ve discovered where a great part of my thought goes. I was thinking about my new frock and red shoes.”
After one week, Milner wondered to herself whether happiness was proving elusive because she sought it too avidly, then landed on a more immediate, corporeal explanation: “perhaps it’s only that you’ve been constipated and eaten too much.”
Horrified by “the depths of [her] own self-absorption”, Milner considered abandoning her project. Instead she kept it up for seven years, until she was 33, and after four began assembling her findings into a book.
Published in 1934, under the pseudonym Joanna Field, A Life of One’s Own is a strange bird, often described as a meta-diary or field guide to Milner’s mind; WH Auden praised it as a “detective story”, referring to the narrator’s deductive reasoning and rigorous process. Milner herself envisaged the book as a sort of self-help guide, which could provide an accessible alternative to psychoanalysis. The positive response led her to eventually retrain as a psychoanalyst herself. A Life of One’s Own, meanwhile, was this year republished by Routledge Classics: a testament to its enduring relevance.
Ninety years later, Milner’s struggle to feel actively engaged in her life might be dubbed “languishing”: a term that was popularised during the pandemic to describe a sense of general stagnation. Her account of feeling herself to be drifting, led by external opinion like “a cork bobbing on the tide”, resonates strongly today as smartphones and social media serve us continual diversions and drown us in chatter.
In her book Attention Span, psychologist Gloria Mark writes that we now spend an average of 47 seconds on any one task, down from an estimated two-and-a-half minutes 20 years ago. Time spent on screens isn’t only affecting our concentration; social media in particular is widely singled out as a factor in the global scourge of depression and anxiety. This year The Anxious Generation, in which psychologist Jonathan Haidt identifies screens as the root cause of many contemporary mental health issues among young people, became an international bestseller and led to campaigns for age restrictions and smartphone bans in schools.
It is certainly easy to imagine the “petty social” preoccupations of Milner’s early diary entries updated for the digital age – an algorithmically-extended search for red shoes, or fishing for compliments by posting a selfie online. Faced with such constant distractions, who can say if Milner would have completed her seven-year investigation of her interior landscape – or even have thought to start it.
As it is, A Life of One’s Own captures what is often lost in coverage of the contemporary crisis of mental health: that distraction (and “languishing”) is a human problem exacerbated by technology, not born of it. Milner also suggests a way of escaping it – one not so immediate as laws or bans, but all the more rewarding for its circuitous route.
As Milner continued her diary practice of “observation and experiment”, she started to see changes in her mental landscape. After six weeks, she observed that recording her experiences seemed to have “an influence upon their nature” – enlarging her self-awareness, and spurring a change in her approach.
The conditions to happiness, she realised, were not stable and consistently accessible or replicable, but “rather the continually receding horizons of the traveller who climbs a mountain”. As Milner branched out into free-writing, word association and dream analysis, shedding light on a dark “hinterland” just outside her ready awareness, the more Milner became convinced: “my own mind was something quite unknown to me.”
In observing her thoughts, occasionally catching them “red-handed”, Milner found that not only did they rarely align with her expectation, or concept of herself as a common-sense, self-aware person; often, they could not be taken at face value. Milner’s stream of consciousness was illogical, even dreamlike.
When she believed herself to be worried or resentful about one thing, in expressing herself on the page, she’d find it rooted in something different – a long-buried memory, perhaps. Feeling afraid of a man of her acquaintance, she could “could be quite aware that [he] was of course not my father, and yet I would continually behave towards him as if he were – just as in dreams a figure can seem to be two people at once”.
Milner’s internal experience also had the power to cloud her perception of reality. Of sighting the first crocus of spring 1927, she wrote: “The buds are swelling but the spring makes a waste inside me – not dead but alive enough to feel its empty ache. Is it all because there’s no news of B?”
Above all, Milner concluded, her mind sought to deceive or distract her from knowing herself. When she saw a person she admired, her first thought was “I’d like to be like that!” – “quite ignoring the fact that the ideal chosen might be incompatible with my temperament or the rest of my aims”, Milner wrote drily. Other times, her impatience was reflected back at her: “my hatred of some part of my self… became a hatred of someone else”.
In writing down her feelings, following an emotional fight with a man (the reader assumes Milner’s husband, the playwright Dennis Milner, whom she married in 1927), Milner indulged spiteful thoughts of suicide – “so he’ll have to be sorry”. Commenting later on that entry, in A Life of One’s Own, Milner notes that her journaling self was “sucking comfort from the thought of the offender’s remorse” at her death, “quite oblivious of the fact that [she] would not be there to see it.”
As exasperated as Milner is by her past self’s “complete irrationality”, she recognises that expressing it on the page served a purpose, clearing away all that “impotent rage” so that she might assess with a clear view what exactly lay at its foundation.
Through this process, Milner started to gain awareness of her patterns of thought, and to acquire limited control over them. Her default, “narrow” mode of thinking was impulsive, and driven to pursue its immediate interests; but by experimenting with certain “internal gestures”, Milner found that she could leash that “questing beast” and alleviate her “sense of dull duty”.
A breakthrough came on an unspecified Wednesday, when Milner went to see Rigoletto at Covent Garden. “Dead tired” and “miserably cramped” on the gallery benches, she felt her thoughts begin to drift from the music. Then, inspired by her earlier experiments with her attention, Milner thought “to put myself out of myself, close to the music”.
She pictured her inner “beam of clear attention”, then sought to redirect it – into the soles of her feet, or the hands of the conductor, or just beside the orchestra. By so changing her perspective, she could clear space for the “real experience” to rush in – and with it meaning, delight and awe.
Milner came to think of this mode “wide attention”: a relaxed but active state of mind by which she could take in the whole of what she was perceiving, whether it was a still-life by Cézanne or a lump of coal.
As Rachel Bowlby notes in her introduction to the new edition of Milner’s meta-journal, Milner’s description of learning to relax her body, muscle by muscle, and quieten her thoughts is today recognisable as meditation. (She even productively experiments with a mantra, “I want nothing”.) “Mindfulness” is often prescribed as a protective barrier or balm for our fragmented attention – but it is invariably dispensed through the smartphone itself, on meditation apps such as Calm and Headspace.
Milner found her own pursuit of inner peace to be an “essentially private affair”, vulnerable to being quashed by any attempt to capture or express it. Indeed, the ways in which Milner found her mind was inclined to work against her can now be seen externalised on a vast scale on social media. “Blind thoughts,” as she termed them, were egocentric, emotional and easily led; they gravitated towards black-and-white judgements and polar extremes, and refused to engage with the reality of other people, instead imagining them “vaguely as a sympathetic and admiring audience”.
Milner’s conceptualisation of “blind thinking” was informed by psychological studies of children, not yet capable of distinguishing between their internal experience and broader reality. From observing herself, she concluded that adults too were inclined towards this “blind submergence”, especially when tired or stressed. Milner describes, during “a ‘scene’ with someone”, hearing “a little faraway voice hinting at the back of my mind that my tears were not quite uncontrollable, that I was really staging the emotion”.
Today, the equivalent experience might be filming yourself crying and posting it to Instagram. Milner’s study suggests social media not as the “new public square”, but a playground for the subconscious’ most undeveloped impulses. “Blind thinking” was inclined to weigh “the trivial and the important… [with] an equal sense of urgency”; it latched onto impossible standards, and readily broke down in feelings of hopelessness or failure.
Blind thinking “wanted me to be the best, cleverest, most beautiful creature, and made me feel that if I was not all of these things then I was the… dregs of creation,” wrote Milner. “And I, poor fool, had been led into taking this for a real and reasonable goal, so that everything which subsequently fell short of it was vaguely disappointing.”
Only by becoming aware of this treacherous undercurrent of her “undirected thought”, clouding her judgement, was Milner able to recognise its absurdity and refocus. Otherwise, it would have continued operating below her level of consciousness, “spinning its web of glowing pictures” at the expense of her happiness and seeing the world as it really was
Her 90-year-old text offers insight into why we might find technology so compulsive, and a drain on our wellbeing – at the same time as exposing the fallacy that we’d thrive without it. Over her nearly decade-long quest, Milner found that part of her mind was “in fact quite determined that I should not discover what the trouble was”, throwing up endless distractions, red-herrings and excuses to resist being known or usefully directed.
She attributed it to a fear of looking inward, and the uncomfortable discoveries that would be found there. Today we may simply blame screens, as Jonathan Haidt and others do.
If A Life of One’s Own suggests a single culprit for our struggle to flourish, it is the capitalist impulse to measure our worth and experience in terms of output and effort. Milner describes the futility of trying to override her “natural oscillations of attention… [and] make the strong push forward last all the time”. Striving after material acquisitions or successes worked against her feeling personally fulfilled, while rest and leisure supported it.
In fact, Milner concludes, that she is only able to access that “wide attention” – the mode that most reliably makes her happy – when she feels a “fundamental sense of security”. To enable everyone to have that sense of security would require a more dramatic societal restructure – not as compelling to our default “narrow attention”, which is drawn to quick fixes and familiar narratives. But in A Life of One’s Own, Milner also proposes a third way, one that’s self-directed.
Having set out to uncover a particular reason for being or purpose – one simple trick for lasting happiness! – Milner instead discovered that “happiness came when I was most widely aware”. She could not control her emotions, motivations or outcomes in life; but, with practice, she could control her attention – and her day-to-day experience with it. By enlarging her awareness, she found her self-conscious paralysis dropped away, replaced with a deeper understanding of herself and others, and a greater connection to meaning.
Milner describes being able to lose herself in everyday sights, of seagulls and buildings; and bring real presence to her interactions with others. This new quality to her relationships, weighting “wordless understanding” over what was said or done, came to make up the bulk of “each day’s catch of happiness”. Milner likens the “source of life” she tapped into as being akin to religious faith in its clarity: “One does not believe that the apple one eats tastes good; it is good.”
She published A Life Of One’s Own so that her method “might be available for anyone”, offering an accessible alternative to the “privileged way out” of psychoanalysis. It is not an easy undertaking, Milner warns in her preface, nor is progress linear – but having previously “been quite at sea about how to live my life”, she came to be sustained by the effort of swimming against the tide.
[See also: Sarah Jessica Parker is the perfect Booker Prize judge]
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